NTU Team Develops Novel Method for Rapid Breast Cancer Diagnosis

In Taiwan, breast cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers in women. Conventional pathological procedures of breast cancer diagnosis usually take weeks to generate the final report. Assistant Prof. Cheng-Chih Hsu's (徐丞志) research group at NTU’s Department of Chemistry collaborated with Dr. Ming-Yang Wang (王明暘) at NTU Hospital (NTUH) to develop a rapid breast cancer diagnosis platform which can be readily coupled with the regular examination protocol, including ultrasonography and core needle biopsy, in hospitals. Their new method takes only a few minutes to collect the chemical data as well as the diagnostic results. The whole process, including core needle biopsy, sample preparation, data acquisition, and tissue typing, can be carried out in the same operating room. Combining machine learning algorithms, they successfully identified malignant breast tumors with an accuracy of 87.5%. In the future, Hsu's group will aim for routine clinical applications such as point-of-care testing (POCT) in clinics. Their study titled, “Predicting Breast Cancer by Paper Spray Ion Mobility Spectrometry Mass Spectrometry and Machine Learning,” was accepted for publication and selected as the front cover in the issue of Analytical Chemistry released on January 21, 2020.

Contact: Dr. Cheng-Chih Hsu, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at NTU
Tel: 02-33663844
Email: ccrhsu@ntu.edu.tw